I can believe it easily. There are many millions of potential values for each element in the search and an unlimited number of elements per search. And the order matters (presumably).
Keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of relatively common words in English alone. At least as many relatively uncommon ones (including stuff like HackerNews). Then there are dozens of popular languages with probably hundreds of thousands of words each, millions of unique misspellings of words in every language, and numbers from a variety of common uses (dates, serial numbers, math problems, etc.).
People also search for character strings from computer code and the like when they are troubleshooting.
And it's not that hard to see instances where the average person would be tapping into all of that variety in a real-life search.
"map of 'address' in 'city'"
"concerts in 'city' on 'date'"
"'arbitrarily long song lyric, movie quote, book quote -- including errors'"
Keep in mind that there are hundreds of thousands of relatively common words in English alone. At least as many relatively uncommon ones (including stuff like HackerNews). Then there are dozens of popular languages with probably hundreds of thousands of words each, millions of unique misspellings of words in every language, and numbers from a variety of common uses (dates, serial numbers, math problems, etc.).
People also search for character strings from computer code and the like when they are troubleshooting.
And it's not that hard to see instances where the average person would be tapping into all of that variety in a real-life search.
"map of 'address' in 'city'"
"concerts in 'city' on 'date'"
"'arbitrarily long song lyric, movie quote, book quote -- including errors'"
"'math problem from school or life'"
"'product name' vs 'product name'"
"'athlete' 'performance metric' since 'date'"
"serial number 'part description'"
"'person name' 'town name'"
"'phone number'"